The experiences of the main character—Oedipa Maas—and the reader are too much alike for the main point of [The Crying of Lot 49] to be other than precisely the terrible ambiguity with which it leaves us. (p. 93)

[In this book] Pynchon is exploiting the diametrically opposite meanings which "entropy" has in thermodynamics and in information theory. Metaphorically, one compensates the other. Here is the narrator describing the Nefastis Machine, an invention whose structure lies at the heart of the novel's semantic structure: "the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information gained about what molecules were where" (… italics mine). Why "But"?

A loss in thermodynamic entropy is not a "loss" from a human standpoint. The importance of Maxwell's Demon is that the information it gains allows it to separate the fast from the slow molecules, thus countering entropy. The modern objection to Maxwell's model has been essentially Oedipa's: "Sorting isn't work?"… Therefore, the Demon requires some input from the Outside to "keep it all cycling"—this is, I take it, Oedipa's purpose as "sensitive."

Pynchon's description, however—if it is his, and not Nefastis' confused version, or Oedipa's filtered through the narrator—doesn't actually match this model…. [What] Pynchon gives us in that scene is both a decrease in thermodynamic entropy and an increase in information, or decrease in information entropy. [Edward] Mendelson has written, echoing the syntax of the passage: "the decrease of thermodynamic entropy is balanced by an increase in information entropy."… But Pynchon has not said "entropy"; he distinctly means information "about what molecules were where." There is, one assumes, a decrease in uncertainty.

I have no resolution. The text in fact does not yield the balance which it invites us to find there. But then this is characteristic of Pynchon's writing. (pp. 93-4)

Yes, Oedipa receives an increasing barrage of information. But its effect is one of paralysis: "This night's profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of beating up. They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by one, pinch by pinch, they were immobilizing her."… The word "malignant" of course returns us to the close of Chapter 1: "what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside…." And the word "replication" is a telling anticipation of Hilarius' paranoia: "They replicate: you flee them, turn a corner, and there they are, coming for you again."… (pp. 94-5)

I wish only to reassert the ominous, paralytic aspect of this information increase. The book closes, after all, with Oedipa's recitation of a sterile set of binaries, which exclude the middle: "how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless."… It seems to me that Oedipa objects to the binary structure itself….

Another fact of this increase which tarnishes its benign aspect is its irreversible loss. The Crying of Lot 49 is a book about loss; loss as part of the transmutation of life…. A neglected part of Nefastis' explanation concerns loss: "one little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke."… There are several analogues to this loss…. What I take these analogues to suggest is that the truth existing in the present moment recedes into the past, and is never present to our knowledge; it is always destroyed by the action it empowers. The action itself remains meaningless, the Message undecoded.

In the words of Gravity's Rainbow, the "arrangements" continue to form, reform; messages are coded, decoded, recoded. But, "the central truth itself … must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly."… The language intentionally anticipates the destruction of information coded into the sailor's mattress when it goes up in flames—in Oedipa's own "Revelation" of conflagration. The word "irreversibly" [which physicists also use] appears three times in the novel…. Pynchon's use of the word follows a progression: it is first used in connection with the "central truth" burning its own message; next, it characterizes our culture's direction, as Oedipa misses her turnoff and finds herself "on the freeway, heading irreversibly for the Bay Bridge."… Lastly, her vision at dawn in the sailor's beaver-board apartment: "It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process."… The mattress will burn, the sailor will die. (pp. 95-6)

[The] information is reducible to a binary structure which Oedipa finds constricting; it is largely conceptual, and the human vehicles who sustain the continuity—Wharfinger, Driblette, the sailor, and the artifacts invested with their humanness—continue to die. The information: what does it tell us?

Mendelson sees this information as sacred. He argues that Oedipa discovers patterns which operate across time, and thus exist in a sacred, recurring present. But Oedipa's efforts … are fraught with maybes, dim visions, poor lighting, and the persistent possibility that it is all a joke woven by Inverarity into his will.

This ambiguity inclines me to read The Crying of Lot 49 as a parable of perception. This ambiguity is the qualifying frame which gives structural tension and honesty to the social, political, and religious ramifications of the novel.

Pynchon lumps together all those who "act in the same special relevance to the word": saint, clairvoyant, true paranoid, dreamer…. Oedipa is one of this group. So are Nefastis, Hilarius, Mucho. I cannot help seeing her as a Kabbalist, engaged in a "scholarly quest" like Stencil in V.….

Mendelson is correct in excepting Oedipa from the company of Hilarius and Mucho, but he does not notice how alike they are, and their similarity is important. (p. 96)

Oedipa's nighttime experience is framed by Nefastis and Mucho, both of whom ascribe reality to the metaphorical linkages they create. What distinguishes Oedipa from them is that she does not. She remains unsure, in the "Middle." (p. 97)

Many of the connections which Oedipa establishes are bogus. Like the metaphor of "entropy" in the Nefastis machine, the links created by her on the basis of "sound" … often join realities which bear no literal relation to one another. On a metaphorical level, however, they do. An example is the founder of the Inamorati Anonymous, who notices the post horn water mark on a stamp at just the moment he discovers his wife having sexual intercourse with his superior. He takes the horn as a "sign" and makes it the symbol of the anti-group which he founds—though he is unaware of the symbol's roots in the European wars among mail services. Yet metaphorically, the original Tristero y Calavera and the executive share a sense of disinheritance, and they assume similar stances in response to that: isolation, silence, waiting. Language, as metaphor, becomes the source of connection; and the connection has reality only in the language itself.

Oedipa/Pynchon (the narrator occupies a kind of Jamesian position within the consciousness of his characters—though this relation is subject to alteration, the distance fluctuates ambiguously as it does not in The Ambassadors) meditates: "The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost."… (p. 98)

I am moving toward a notion of the text of The Crying of Lot 49 as fully metaphoric, existing in the "middle" between Inside and Outside, between the zeroes and ones. It occupies the same linguistic space as Oedipa and the reader. If we look again at the formulation in the book, we see that metaphor itself is both a "thrust at truth and a lie"—it becomes disjunctive ("or") only as it is employed from one side or the other. The next sentence, with the above in mind, is crucial: "Oedipa did not know where she was." At the end of the book she is still between the zeroes and ones. (p. 99)

This is important: the Tristero whose existence she seeks to prove is her own death, as well as an "alternative to America's exitlessness." The escape from the tower means a recognition of one's own death as the price of freedom. (p. 100)

[With Oedipa's reference to "Book of the Dead"] Pynchon intends a multiple set of references…. The point of both [Tibetan and Egyptian] Books of the Dead is that the art of living is related to the art of dying. This returns us to one of the cultural themes in Pynchon: that our culture is predicated on a denial of death….

When Oedipa attends the auction, she enters a room whose imagery is that of the Tristero in its ominous, preapocalyptic aspect. The auctioneer is named "Passerine"—pertaining to passing (over). The room is the last of the book's analogues to Clerk Maxwell's model: it is a closed system, doors shut and locked, light cut off. Oedipa is inside, still sorting, waiting for some revelation. Nefastis had explained the Demon's need for information from Outside to "keep it all cycling." Oedipa echoes the phrase when she recalls Pierce had told her once, "that's all the secret, keep it bouncing."… Her meditation continues, "He must have known, writing the will, facing the spectre, how the bouncing would stop." It is difficult to read this ending as "invigorating." Yet Oedipa represents a source of energy within that system; so does the possible Tristero. The book leaves us, like Oedipa, in the midst of this ambiguity.

I am convinced that the most embracing framework for discussing Pynchon is structure, by which I mean that Pynchon's writings exhibit a tightly packed overlay of myths, psychoanalysis, social, historical, and political ideas, which share specific structures—just as Maxwell's model is the central figure of an Inside/Outside structure that pervades The Crying of Lot 49. We must resist the temptation to see his "meaning" as present in any one structure or set of structures. The search for pattern and the ambiguity of our findings locates this "meaning" dialectically above the patterns he employs. As a corollary of this, the importance of linear concerns such as character development and plot lines must be in the relation they bear to the static cluster of structures and images which permeate the narrative. (p. 101)

Thomas Hill Schaub, "Open Letter in Response to Edward Mendelson's 'The Sacred, the Profane, and "The Crying of Lot 49"'," in boundary 2 (copyright © boundary 2, 1976), Vol. V, No. 1, Fall, 1976, pp. 93-101.